Top nuclear envoys from North Korea and the United States will meet in Geneva, Switzerland, today to discuss the resumption of the long-stalled six-party talks aimed at ending the North’s nuclear program.

This is the second high-level dialogue between the two countries in three months amid growing signs that the two sides will soon find a breakthrough in the standoff so multilateral nuclear disarmament talks can reopen in the near future.

North Korea walked away from the talks, which also include South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, in 2009 over international sanctions for its nuclear and long-range missile tests.

Kim Gye-kwan, the North’s chief nuclear envoy, arrived in Geneva Saturday night (local time) via Beijing. His counterpart Steve Bosworth arrived there Sunday with his successor Glyn Davies. Davies is currently U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

They had a preliminary meeting on Sunday and will hold a closed-door session until Tuesday. The venue for the meeting remains unknown.

The aim of the dialogue is to check the North’s willingness to accept preconditions for the resumption of the talks suggested by the United States. Washington has urged Pyongyang to halt its nuclear activities, including its uranium enrichment program, and allow IAEA inspectors to monitor the suspension, while the North still calls for an early resumption of the dialogue without preconditions.

A senior U.S. State Department official said the second round of U.S.-North Korea talks will be held in an “exploratory phase.”

The official said on condition of anonymity, “We are making this effort again not because we have any new information from North Korea but because we think it is important to keep the door open to engagement.”

Wi Sung-lac, Seoul’s former top nuclear negotiator on Pyongyang’s nuclear programs, recently expressed cautious hope for the resumption of the talks. “The South and North could reach a certain level of agreement throughout the two rounds of inter-Korean talks,” Wi said last week. “In this context, I’m not so pessimistic about the second meeting between the North and the United States.”

Evans Revere, former president of the Korea Society and Asian expert at the U.S. State Department, echoed the view saying the probability “keeps increasing.”

Meanwhile, the United States and North Korea have agreed to resume operations to recover the remains of U.S. soldiers unaccounted for from the 1950-1953 Korean War after a six-year hiatus, a sign of warming Washington-Pyongyang relations.